Commiserations, fellow Mumsnetters. Christmas can be such a difficult time for some people. What strikes me most on reading this thread is that a holiday is not meant to be like this. No other occasion places this amount of conventional obligation or sense of duty as this one does. My mother took on the whole lot of this - present buying, cooking, washing up, decorating, wrapping - this was in the 80s and 90s. Here were are in 2022 and it strikes me that, yet again, the overwhelming majority of the significant mental and emotional labour falls to women.
My Mum preferred Easter; for her Christmas was a lot of hard work whilst my father sat in his armchair, drank, smoked and watched TV. I prefer Easter for other reasons: the sentimentality and family emphasis on Christmas hurts because I miss my mum so much. Despite it never really having been 'our' time of year, it's never been the same without her.
The Christmas labour is pretty evenly divided between DH and me. He does the present-buying for DC, each of us buys for our individual family members and friends. I decorate the house, he hangs the lights outside, and I pre-prepare puddings and veg and do most of the gift-wrapping. On the day itself he does the turkey, pigs in blankets and potatoes and I do the gravy and remaining veg.
My mum had a recurring anxiety dream in which nobody had any presents on Christmas morning, and she'd spend a stressed-out time upstairs, cocooning her own possessions in brown paper and sellotape. She'd wake up more strung-out and exhausted than when she went to sleep!
I'm told that this dream is very common. Hope all of you manage to get something resembling a break, or failing that can hide in the understairs cupboard with a whole bottle of Baileys if Aunt Marge's ranting is getting too much again ....
Jingle Bells 💃